Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Interviews

    I have not had particularly good luck over the past week with my interviews.  When they happen they are good and useful.  I am just having a particularly hard time making them happen.  We make a plan for 10, I arrive at 10, but the meeting starts (at the earliest) at 10:45.  Or, something that happens more frequently these days, the meeting doesn’t happen at all and I am told to come back on some other day and time.  Given that it can take hours to get to some of these places, this does not inspire confidence.  Indonesians call their tendency to be late to things jam karet (rubber time), but this trip it’s much more than just being late for things.  Yesterday I learned that a press meeting that I had been personally invited to attend was postponed for two days–only when I arrived at the place where it was to take place.  I’m having revenge fantasies in which I am holding meetings in which I have something that they want, and if they do not arrive precisely on time I tell them to come back later.  Unlikely.

    So yesterday while consoling myself with some tasty West Sumatran food, I had an interesting experience.  The radio was playing a kroncong song that sounded strangely familiar.  (Kroncong is an Indonesian musical style that combines Western and Indonesian styles.  It frequently has a sort of reggae or Hawaiian feel to it, with heavy emphasis on the back beat.)  I thought and thought about why the song sounded so familiar, and then it came to me: it was a downbeat version of "Walk the Line."  Instead of Johnny Cash’s rich bass, the melody was played by an Indonesian flute or whistle.  Cool.

  • Real Indonesian

    I watched a TV program the other day called Binar, which is a compression of the words Bahasa Indonesia Benar, meaning "True Indonesian Language."  It’s sponsored by the Ministry of Education here, and it is aimed at helping Indonesians to learn how to speak their language properly.  It seems to be aimed primarily at teenagers.  It features a very common device in Indonesian cultural propaganda: a well-dressed 50-something woman who speaks slowly, calmly, and knowledgeably as sort of a fountain of information and a symbol of Javanese propriety.  (This is the image that former President Megawati Sukarnoputri presents.)  I don’t know what the program normally deals with, but this time it was about the use of foreign words in common parlance–and how this is a bad thing. 

    Indonesian is a language which, like English, is well known for its propensity through history for borrowing words from other languages.  Sanskrit, Arabic (and thereby Turkish and Persian), Chinese (mostly Hokkien, some Cantonese), Portuguese, and Dutch have contributed hundreds (if not thousands) of words each to Indonesian.  Currently Indonesian is borrowing words from English, and the program was focused on trying to stop this practice by reminding people of the "proper" Indonesian words for things commonly referred to using English.  It was funny because these proper Indonesian replacements are very transparently recent borrowings from other European languages.

    Some examples, drawn from a mock dialog on planning a wedding:

    email should be pos el (pos was borrowed from the English "post," and el is a short form of "electric")
    calling should be  menelpon (the root of this word is telpon, from "telephone," and the prefix me- has been added as the Indonesian way of turning nouns into verbs)
    by faks should be  melalui faksimile (faksimile from French is distinguished from faks and faksimali from English)
    client should be  klien (the same word borrowed from Dutch a hundred years earlier)
    wedding organizer should be  pengelola pesta pernikahan (pesta was borrowed from the Portuguese fiesta, and means "party"; pernikahan is a abstract noun constructed from the Arabic root nikah, or "wedding")
    office should be  kantor (borrowed from Dutch)

    There were of course a couple of examples of English borrowing that have entirely Indonesian replacements (exhibition = pameran, visitor = tamu, print = cetak, invitation = undangan).  But it was very interesting that the characters on the show kept saying "OK" to signal agreement or understanding.  And they saying that people using English words were attempting to put on airs (gengsi, from the Arabic ghinsi).  In my view, Indonesian, like French or any other language, has no hope of resisting English linguistic imperialism.